Oh Father - Music Video

Music Video

The music video was filmed during the last week of October 1989 at Culver Studios in Culver City, California, and was directed by David Fincher, who worked with Madonna in her video for "Express Yourself". Described by Carol Clerk, author of Madonnastyle, as "harrowingly autobiographical", the video was shot entirely in black-and-white and recreates the death scene of a young woman, exploring the tempestuous relationship that ensues between the husband and the daughter she has left behind. It begins with a young girl playing in the backyard as snow falls on the ground. The scene shifts to that of a bedside, where a young woman who has died, lies. Her husband covers her with a white sheet as a priest prays. Madonna, wearing a long, black coat, sings the song underneath a snow-covered, dead tree, as the young girl plays with her dead mother's jewelry. The husband comes and shouts at the girl, tearing away the woman's pearl necklace which drop at the little girl's feet. The adult Madonna is shown lying beside another man singing the song as the little girl visits her mother's grave. The man gets up and slaps Madonna in the face, as the little girl cries in front of the grave. She is taken away from the graveyard by her father, as interspersed scenes show the girl being kissed by her mother, her trying to reach the knob of a door, and Madonna powdering the bruise mark on her face. As the singer walks through a forest, the father is shown resorting to drinking in grief. A funeral scene follows, showing the girl walking up to her mother's wake. When she sees her mother's lips sealed with thread, she runs away from the wake. Madonna walks through a house, where shadows show the girl being scolded and shouted at by the father. Ultimately she walks to the graveyard and stands beside an old man, implying that she herself is the little girl portrayed. The video ends with the little girl dancing in front of her mother's grave as snow falls around her.

"Typical Fincher features are present: black and white, shadows, leisurely camera movement, extreme high angles, and some slow motion. A black and white setting dissolves between shots, creating a sense of fluidity between scenes and images, and many scenes are shot in snow, particularly the reverse-tracking shot in the opening from the snowscape into the house. However, the child-centered narrative in which trauma in childhood supposedly affects the life of an adult is not visually coherent."

—Browning talking about the music video in his book, David Fincher: Films That Scar

Madonna later said that the end of the video was "my attempt to embrace and accept my mother's death". According to feminist writer E. Ann Kaplan, the video is said to have taken stylistic inspiration from the 1941 Orson Welles film, Citizen Kane. She described the video as a "typical adolescent story in Western cultural terms". It foregrounds Madonna's repressive Catholic upbringing and her conflicted relationship not only to her literal father in the video, but also a symbolic one—the Holy Father, the Law and the Patriarchy. Bruce David Forbes, author of Religion and Popular Culture in America, felt that the video drew on Madonna's childhood experiences and dramatized her efforts to renegotiate these relationships, in her daily interactions with her lover and father, and in relation to Catholicism, which the singer referred to in the line "Oh father I have sinned". Dunn noticed that like the Pepsi commercial shot for her earlier single "Like a Prayer", Madonna's persona is split into a child and adult, who repeatedly fuse and separate. Dunn commented that as the narrative developed, the child is shown singing, but the adult Madonna's voice is heard, and when the adult Madonna appears in a hallway, her shadow is that of a child. Madonna responded to these observations by saying: "I think the biggest reason I was able to express myself and not be intimidated was not having a mother." Dunn then moved onto the scene during the funeral, when the child trembled from seeing her mother's lips sewn shut. Described by her as one of the most troubling shots in mainstream music videos, the scene was inspired by Madonna's memory of her mother lying in her wake. The singer recalled in a 1991 interview with Vanity Fair, that she remembered that her mother's lips looked funny in the funeral. When she got closer, she saw that Madonna Sr's lips had been sewn together. This image of her mother had haunted Madonna for many years, and led her to comment that she never could resolve her Electra complex. The singer further explained:

I had to deal with the loss of my mother and then had to deal with the guilt of her being gone and then I had to deal with the loss of my father when he married my stepmother. So I was just one angry abandoned girl. I'm still angry. The part of me that goes around saying "Fuck you! Fuck you!" is the part that's covering up the part that's saying "I'm hurt!" I guess all of this came through in the video.

In the 1991 MTV special hosted by Kurt Loder titled Breakfast with Madonna, Loder described the video as "amazing", then asked Madonna if her father had seen it. Madonna responded, "To tell you the truth, I don't know if he's seen it. I'm sort of afraid to ask." After MTV world-premiered the video on November 11, 1989, they wanted to pull it off broadcast until the scene with the lips shut was removed. Madonna disagreed and told them that she would cancel future deals with the channel, prompting MTV to air the video again. The music video has been honored by Rolling Stone as one of "The 100 Top Music Videos", placed at number 66. In 1991, the video received a nomination at the 33rd Grammy Awards, in the category of Best Short Form Music Video. Madonna's vision of reconciliation in the music videos of both "Oh Father" and her 1986 single "Papa Don't Preach" was later included in the third level of Madonna Studies, a controversial development of a field in media studies during the 1990s. The music video for "Oh Father" is commercially available on Madonna's The Immaculate Collection (1990) DVD/VHS compilation.